I went to school 20 years ago and everything was (then still-alive) solaris/bsd or (then new) Linux. University web infrastructure, engineering school computer lab thin clients, etc.

When I started work, it was a little different, but the same effect. Most of the legacy systems were from the early 90s and made for solaris or hpux. And by the time it was time to port to a more modern os, us new kids naturally gravitated to the path of least resistance and least licensing costs. That was either pure oss linux or (eventually) red hat, which by virtue of being intended a mass market product competing or complementing purley oss solutions, was loads cheaper than something (by then) niche like a vendor-supplied unix system.

Windows got skipped over for everything except desk machines.

Now it's 20 years later and us greenhorns are turning into greybeards who've never in our careers seriously considered doing anything serious on windows.

Studying superstition as an anthropological curiosity is different from studying it as a theory of the universe with predictive power.

It is useful to understand the general outlines of crazy. It is far less useful the expend effort at becoming crazy.

I've never studied astrology, voodoo, or divination, and yet I have a very strong opinion that these things don't belong as degree programs at universities. Go figure.

Sniffing out witches, on the other hand, is an essential skill, whatever name it goes by.

Yes I do. In this particular case, the news divisions of these media companies consistently align with Democratic party messaging.

Political speech being protected explicitly by the 1st amendment, this isn't a bribe the way a bag of cash is a bribe, but it is an exchange of favors when D politicians go out of their way to protect D-aligned media outlets from perceived threats from R-aligned private actors.

Like I said, I have no dog in the fight and don't really pay attention to corporate media on either side without a hefty grain of salt. But I do find it interesting that a lot of people seemingly believe the hardball is only out of bounds when it flies in a particular direction.

But I do find it intriguing how it's okay to launch politically motivated lawfare from one direction, but it's a crisis of democracy when it comes from the other direction.

Almost like the outrage and cheerleading are an act while the lawyers keep on collecting a few k or more per hour dragging these things out...

If training data weights itself by sheer volume, one might expect the thousand page paperweights she wrote to make the average chatbot sound just a little more objectivist than the average bear.

Every dealer everywhere pushes thousand dollar tire warranties for $800 worth of tires. It's just background noise when you're buying a car.

Chatbots whose ripply muscles and chiseled features ravish the conversation like a trashy romance novel.

I'll be back as a consultant at triple the rate in less than 18 months to clean up the mess...

Even if you're automating something you yourself do on a regular basis.

This is a general property of the universe: put something under a (metaphorical or literal) microscope and you discover things that are at once obvious and at the same time fantastical.

Making Things is fun and frustrating that way.

Being unaware of where the opponent is and going through the motions of kicking a phantom ball was very much par for the course.

Cupcake, 45% of government work entails coming up with workarounds to problems created by the other 50%. The remaining 5% (at best) is something you might call useful without having to supress laughter.

This extends to contractors. Microsoft is a big one.

Every place I can think of residential water and electricity rates are a whole different animal than commercial and industrial rates.

In my town in particular, the marginal rate for *residential* water use shoots up by a factor of 4 once you go over the threshold for regular domestic consumption. Cook and clean, and you pay a few hundred per quarter. Water your lawn and it's a few thousand.

I imagine if the leftyloons around here ever allowed a datacenter, the water commissioner would be purchasing service trucks with solid gold steering wheels in short order from all the profit such a heavy water user would generate.

Same with power. And taxes. Industrial and commercial property subsidizes a whole lot of infrastructure.

This Austrualian thing is a grandstanding no-op at best.

You let the tree huggers in to space launch, they'll be demanding six-year-long environmental reviews for every single piece of a moon base or asteroid sampling flight.

Unless the chinese do it, then crickets.

Yeah, I don't understand how he makes more money than I do, I just know he stole it from me somehow....